Happy New Year! This morning I woke up at 8:20 to a quiet house. Since we've had kids a quiet house is a rare occurrence- akin to eclipses, white peacocks, and drinking a whole hot cup of coffee. 

It also fills me with instant dread. 

I quickly tip-toed up the stairs to find perfectly fine kids still soundly dozing. While army-crawling back downstairs, my mind overfilled with possibilities- quiet time? blog? clean up the kitchen? catch up on emails? Or I could do the truly crazy:

Go back to bed. 

And this, friends, is how the first Monday of the New Year found me. Snoozing in bed until the thud, thud of my son jumping out of bed reverberated overhead. (As my husband says, he's part-Tigger.) It was a great way to embrace my new word for 2017: 

How does this relate to sleep? 

It's embarrassing to admit that sleep's been a low priority these last seven years (since our oldest was born) in an attempt to fit it all in. My goal this year is to work smarter and sleep more, so I can grow better in the process. 

(It's difficult to grow when you're sleep-deprived.)

Personal growth and progress are often-neglected areas for most of us, in the pursuit of making time for everyone and everything else. Something we plan on getting to later, when life gets simpler. But a recent conversation with a friend changed this for me. While talking to a young 20-something about life, this snippet of wisdom was shared:

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This hit me hard when we talked about it. In the race to keep everyone learning, safe & eating broccoli, it's easy to migrate ourselves to the back-burner. But what does that model for our kids? 

Last year's word was courage to stop treading water and swim towards some big goals. This year's goal is to get out of the water and thrive on solid ground. There's growing to do!

Do you have a word for 2017? Would love to hear it in the comments below!